Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole.

Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or scattering of spores that take root and grow, maturing and adapting within new environments. The examples of diasporic cultural production explored in this volume reflect on loss and dispersal, but they also constitute expansive and dynamic intellectual and artistic production, neither wholly African nor wholly American (in the hemispheric sense), whose resonance deeply inflects all of the Americas. African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represents a call for multidisciplinary, collaborative and complex approaches to the subject of the African diaspora.

Persephone Braham is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Delaware.

ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionI. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAS PROJECTPersephone Braham1. Keith Morrison: Middle PassageJulie L. McGeeII. SLAVERY, MIGRATION, AND RACIAL IDENTITY2. The African Diaspora in the Americas: The Caribbean Dimension Franklin W. Knight3. Afro-Antillean Presence in the Latin American Melting PotCarla Guerrón Montero4. Puerto Ricans in the Harlem Riot of 1935 Lorrin Thomas5. Rethinking “Racial Democracy”: Perspectives from Black Thinkers in Twentieth-Century Brazil Paulina L. AlbertoIII. AFRICA IN THE ARTS: MIGRATION, IMPROVISATION, EXCHANGE6. Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas Mónica Domínguez-Torres7. Improvisation in the Danzón and its Ties to Early New Orleans JazzRobin Moore8. Afrochic: Africa in the Modernist Imagination Camara Dia Holloway9. True Blood: Colorblindness, Blanqueamiento, and Vampire Ethnicity in Castro’s CubaPhillip Penix-Tadsen 10. Introspection and Projection in Cuban ArtColette Gaiter11. Hearing Reggaeton’s African-American AddressWayne Marshall12. Black-British and Other African Diaspora Artists Visualizing SlaveryEddie ChambersIV. BLACK AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE GLOBAL HUMANITIES13. Race and Representation in the Digital Humanities: An Inter-American Case StudyIfeoma Nwankwo14. Black American Studies at the University of Delaware: Education Across the LinesCarol HendersonContributors